CIOs could save themselves a lot of money by limiting
recreational use of corporate networks by staff.
An international survey of more than 1,000 CIOs in medium to
large firms, commissioned by network optimisation firm Blue Coat,
showed that 40% of traffic on company networks was
non-work-related.
Dave Aspery, technology vice-president at Blue Coat, said
companies needed to identify the applications that clogged the
company pipes. They should then use the available tools to
prioritise traffic that is important to the company.
He said a Blue Coat customer had saved itself the cost of three
Microsoft Exchange servers to handle its Asia-Pacific e-mail by
eliminating all non-corporate traffic and consolidating traffic
into a single server in Australia.
Nigel Hawthorn, Blue Coat's marketing director for Europe,
Middle East and Africa, said this was not about cutting off staff
access to applications such as Facebook and eBay. "This is about
putting the company first," he said.
"A lot of CIOs don't want to stop staff from using the company
network for private purposes because it keeps them in the office.
If they spend two minutes of their lunch hour doing private stuff,
they probably spend the other 58 minutes on work."
Aspery said the switch to service oriented architecture and the
growing popularity of Web 2.0 tools such as mashups prompted at
least half of respondents to confess they could account for less
than 60% of the applications on their networks.
"This has obvious security implications as well as direct cost
implications for network expenses," he said. "By identifying and
limiting the bandwidth hogs, whether they are people or
applications, response times for important business applications
will be quicker and staff happier as a result."